The IFPI's highly-publicized bust of torrent site OiNK hasn't had its intended …

Share this story

It took investigators two years to infiltrate and bring down UK-based OiNK, an invite-only music sharing site that was much loved by its smallish community. As we reported at the time, the IFPI and the BPI lauded the takedown as a major victory against piracy.

After the echoes of OiNK's final snort dissipated, one could hear the virtual rumbling of a new stampede: the post-OiNK explosion. The closure of OiNK has led directly or indirectly to the establishment of nearly half a dozen new file-sharing sites. Is this what the IFPI and BPI had in mind? Somehow we doubt it.

The theory is that "busts" will eventually drive such sites out of existence, as they need to go deeper and deeper "underground" to avoid being busted. What appears to actually be happening is something quite different: the free advertising for P2P that comes from these closures not only helps spread the word about the existence of such sites, but it also appears to motivate more folks to step up their involvement in setting up, running, and supporting such sites. In short, it's a call to arms.

It's also not hard to find out where the OiNK action has moved to, either. In the last three days, Ars writers have been able to gain access to nearly all of the new sites to pop up in the wake of OiNK, and the reasons why are so simple, yet utterly elusive to those who are working day and night to close these sites: it's not the supply of "P2P sites" that drives this, it's the demand from users online, across the globe.

Supply is not the same as demand

The Romans had a funny way of looking at social disorder. In general, they viewed leaders as far greater threats than those they led. This gave way to the kind of social "management" school that preferred to brutally punish or kill a leader, while letting everyone else go. The Romans, as you may know, had more than their share of uprisings, riots, and all-out revolts as a result.

The focus on shutting down popular P2P/BitTorrent tracker sites operates under the same philosophical strategy: cut off the head, and the body should die. Shut down the site, and now you have thousands of users who can't be pirates anymore. Of course, never was there such a silly—or obviously wrong—idea.

The response to the death of OiNK was not a withering of the file-sharing community. Instead, what happened was the establishment or planned launch of three major new P2P sites and at least two underground networks. The Pirate Bay did its usual thing and announced their plans to resurrect OiNK as the cleverly-named BOiNK; TorrentFreak brought news of The Pirate Bay's plans to everyone several days ago, but BOiNK is still nowhere to be seen. Given the fact that these guys brought Suprnova back, there's little reason to doubt them, though.

Meanwhile, both What.cd and Waffles.fm have stepped into the void created by OiNK's closure, as have two underground services claimed to have been started by former members. dAiMeSeL, an administrator for one of the DC++ hubs who corresponded with Ars Technica anonymously, said that plans for their hub were already under way when OiNK was shut down, but that the closure only helped feed the demand for a new site. dAiMeSeL said that the demand to admit new users was too high, and that the big worry is that "another mole could slip in."

Waffles.fm is also having growing problems. The site has had to ask its members to refrain from selling invites to the invitation-only service. The invites are in high demand, but someone could also risk the community's security by selling invites off to a mole. Then the site pulled the plug on all new registrations, as the admins found it difficult to keep up with demand. In an interview with Threat Level, a site admin said the site was also the target of a DoS attack in its earliest days, apparently from a disgruntled OiNK member who didn't get an invite.

By and large, however, the story is one of cooperation and recovery. It's not professional site admins who really make any of this possible. It's the throng of users who will, at a moment's notice, become site admins or contribute in other ways to rapidly bring up not one, but a handful of potential replacements in a time of "need." This is the reason why you can't kill the OiNKs and Suprnovas of the world, and expect change. The demand is there, and so is the technology to keep this game of cat and mouse going for a very long time.

Share this story

Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher